I am working on revising a huge number of pages on somebody’s website. When I go to see the online results, I usually see the old page and so I know to hit the refresh button and I see the newer version. (This is true for Firefox, Netscape and Opera but I think Internet Explorer always shows the most recent version).
Anyway, if someone is visiting a website that has been updated, how long is it before the browser shows the updated version? Will the browser continue to show the old version as long as the refresh button is never clicked?
For that matter, how does anybody know they are visiting the most recent version of a website unless they have clicked the refresh button?
I don’t know when the “automatic” refresh happens, but in every browser I’ve ever used you can tell it not to cache, which means you always get the current content. Assuming your connection speed is above dial-up, this is a good adjustment to make IMO.
The browser will never show the updated page unless it’s asked to. Usually that happens when you hit the refresh button. Some sites might have javascript on the page that reloads the page every so often, but except for that, you’ll have to hit the refresh button.
Most browsers check that cache after they are closed an reopened, or after a period of time elapse. You can usually set them to always check for updates, or never, but the default is usually once per session.
Browsers check the date of the file on the web and compare it to the date of the file in the cache. If the file on the web is newer, they use that one, otherwise, they use the cache. (Note: this only applies to regular html. Many sites use databases, so you can go to a place like CNN several times a day and get an updated list of stories). If you go to look at the date is the same, it goes to the cache, not the web.
If the user has not gone to that site that day, they will see the revised site.
The issue is that when you are editing the page, you keep seeing the older page even with the main page is available. Since the date is the same as the date in your cache, it uses the cached version. This will go away after a day.
The better way is to hold down CTRL and click “Refresh” to force the web browser to download the page on the web.
Reality Chuck
When I’m testing HTLM or JavaScript offline on my own computer, I’ve found that holding the “SHIFT” key and clicking refresh does a better job than just clicking refresh.
Since you too are a webmaster, I’m sure you’d agree that it would be too annoying to put “Remember to click the refresh button” on every page of someone’s website.
Anyway, if you say that it only takes one day before the new page shows up, that’s not too bad.
Zipper JJ
I’ll definitely investigate how those meta tags work.
This is what I came in to mention. You have to be careful with these, though; if you’re launching a website into production, leaving in short expiration times will make all your visitors download everything almost every time. For people on dialup, this can amount to a noticeably slower website.